Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said the second wave of coronavirus pandemic has hit its peak in the national Capital with experts hinting that the cases of infection will decline in the coming days.
“We noticed that cases increased and it reached 4,500 new Covid-19 cases on September 17 and now coming down. So experts believe that the second wave of coronavirus which had hit the Delhi is now on peak and its intensity will be less in the coming days,” Kejriwal said while speaking to the media.
The CM said the high-level virtual review meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to review Covid-19 response and management was fruitful.
“When new Covid-19 cases were reported in the large number, we had controlled the coronavirus cases with the help of the Central Government, NGO and Delhiites. I want to thank everyone for their efforts. As a responsible Government, we had increased testing from 20,000 to 60,000 daily,” he said.
He said the Government was “keeping its fingers crossed” and hoped that the Covid-19 cases will “gradually” come down due to the steps taken by the AAP dispensation.
“The best way to defeat coronavirus is to conduct aggressive testing to identify and isolate positive cases,” the Chief Minister said.
“The coronavirus cases have increased in Delhi because testing was massively scaled up. The daily cases were around 4,500 on September 16 which have now started coming down and currently, there are around 3,700 cases (daily),” he said.
According to the CM, if the testing would have scaled down to the previous level of 20,000 tests (daily), the cases would also have come down to around 1,500 per day in the city.
Kejriwal hoped that the Government steps, including increasing containment zones from 550 in mid-August to around 2,000 now, will gradually bring down the number of Covid-19 positive cases in the coming days.
On Wednesday, Delhi recorded 3,714 fresh Covid-19 cases as the infection tally in the city mounted to over 2.56 lakh, while the death toll rose to 5,087.
More than 60,000 Covid-19 tests were done in the city on Tuesday, according to the bulletin issued by the Delhi health department on Wednesday.
The total number of active cases, as on Wednesday, stood at 30,836, it said.